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About Friends Like Us

For Willa Jacobs, looking at her best friend Jane is like looking in a mirror on a really good day. Strangers assume they are sisters, and they share everything: an apartment, clothing, and groceries, and the challenge of making rent on part-time jobs. Together they are a fortress of private jokes and shared opinions, with a friendship so close there’s hardly room for anyone else. But when Ben, Willa’s oldest friend, reappears and falls in love with Jane, Willa wonders: Can she let her two best friends find happiness with each other if it means they leave her behind?

About Friends Like Us

With her critically acclaimed debut novel, Still Life with Husband, Lauren Fox established herself as a wise and achingly funny chronicler of domestic life and was hailed as “a delightful new voice in American fiction, a voice that instantly recalls the wry, knowing prose of Lorrie Moore” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Fox’s new novel glitters with these pleasures—fearless wordplay, humor, and nuance—and asks us the question at the heart of every friendship: What would you give up for a friend’s happiness?

For Willa Jacobs, seeing her best friend, Jane Weston, is like looking in a mirror on a really good day. Strangers assume they are sisters, a comparison Willa secretly enjoys. They share an apartment, clothing, and groceries, eking out rent with part-time jobs. Willa writes advertising copy, dreaming up inspirational messages for tea bags (“The path to enlightenment is steep” and “Oolong! Farewell!”), while Jane cleans houses and writes poetry about it, rhyming “dust” with “lust,” and “clog of hair” with “fog of despair.” Together Willa and Jane are a fortress of private jokes and shared opinions, with a friendship so close there’s hardly room for anyone else. But when Ben, Willa’s oldest friend, reappears and falls in love with Jane, Willa wonders: Can she let her two best friends find happiness with each other if it means leaving her behind?

Praise

“[A] hilarious, heartbreaking novel.” —Marie Claire“A strikingly wise exploration of the bonds people forge and break. Fox delivers on plot, but it’s her insight, emotion, and eye for universal truths that make Friends Like Us memorable.” —People“Friends Like Us is at once a hilarious page-turner and a wise meditation on friendship, marriage, and the ways in which our parents’ mistakes so often shape our lives.” —J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Maine

“[A] poignant comedy. . . . Fox makes you care about Willa and everyone else in Friends Like Us long after you’ve finished.” —The Washington Post

“Reading Friends Like Us is like finding an old photograph of yourself when you were in your twenties…. Fox will have you laughing and crying and calling your best friend in the middle of the night.” —Rebecca Rasmussen, author of The Bird Sisters

“A perfect . . . page-turner for cozy winter nights.” —Glamour

“Fox has drawn a sharp portrait of . . . female friendship, inscribing both the joys and the needs that maintain its bonds while also illuminating the countervailing forces that could send its partners flying apart.” —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“Rings with the familiarity of a long-lost friend.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Fox delivers a punch (and a story I can’t stop thinking about) with her surprising and deeply honest novel.” —Laura Dave, author of The First Husband

“Friends Like Us, with delicacy and humor, captures the ambiguities of attraction in an ironic age.” —Vogue “Absolutely killer. . . . It’s a punch in the gut, watching how friendships change as these women move into adulthood.” —Eleanor Brown, author of The Weird Sisters “Willa’s multifarious humor is well matched by Jane’s quieter presence. . . . Fox proves herself here, as in her first book, attracted to the crumbling, collapsing character of friendships as well as romances.” —San Francisco Chronicle“How to make a novel about the shaky geometry of romance feel fresh? Lauren Fox, in her second novel, succeeds admirably, partly because she places her twenty-something characters against a grim backdrop of economic uncertainty and the not-quite-healed wounds of parental failures.” —The Boston Globe

“Sure to resonate with anyone who has experienced regrets and complications in a super-close friendship. . . . This is a story filled with true-to-life people complete with their messy relationships and salted with hilarious word play and other witticisms that don’t take away from the poignancy of the plot. To sum up: Pure. Enjoyment.” —Bookreporter “The hard emotional truths go down easily amid the smart, rapid-fire wit. A pure if heartbreaking pleasure.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Dazzlingly entertaining and utterly engaging, Friends Like Us draws an intimate sketch of need and loss, crosshatched by friendship and love. Willa is funny, fallible, and fierce as she navigates family’s inexorable pull and the self’s desire for individual orbit. Fox’s gorgeous novel grapples with ordinary truths in an extraordinary way, and will leave you paying more attention to the people who matter to you most.” —Gwendolen Gross, author of The Orphan Sister

“Wounded, witty Willa is a remarkably complex creation. Moving, artfully written.” —Kirkus Reviews“Friends Like Us is smart, funny, and winning, but the thing that strikes me most about it is how honest it is. Lauren Fox perfectly captures the way best friends love each other, make each other laugh, and sometimes, at their worst moments, break each other’s hearts.” —Lauren Grodstein, author of A Friend of the Family

About Lauren Fox

Lauren Fox is the author of Still Life with Husband. She earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 1998, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Seventeen, Glamour, and Salon. She lives in… More about Lauren Fox

About Lauren Fox

Lauren Fox is the author of Still Life with Husband. She earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 1998, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Seventeen, Glamour, and Salon. She lives in… More about Lauren Fox